Thursday, May 6, 2010

tRicky T-Day!

Off and on for quite awhile, mom has been trying to teach me to pull open a door. She really needs me to be able to do this trick so that I can help her when her hands are full and we are heading outside. From the video (hastily made - sorry), you can see that I am very willing to go and grab the rope and back up a little, but then I drop the rope like a hot potato and ask for my treat. We cut the footage down a lot (you can thank us later - lol!) but I only managed to slightly move the door in the last clip (blink and you miss it)(Actually, we just watched the video again and I move the door a tiny bit in the second clip too!). Does any one have any suggestions? I am not clicker-trained but I do know "yes" as a marker word. Mom tried to get me to progress by making me try again without a reward and hoping I would get mad and just yank open that door. But I don't get mad!

I also wanted to tell you that we are sorry but we're trying out "word verification" for comments now. We keep getting spammed by the same person in Chinese (Priscilla told us to delete all his comments - he is not nice - thanks, Priscilla!) and we are hoping word verification will help.

Teach Ricky a "hold" cue. teach it 1st with still as you would for a hold for fetch. So teach a "take it" then a "hold" and just have him sit or stand holding something in his mouth that you give him. Once he can do that successfully for at min 20-30 seconds, then start asking him to "hold" and move a bit with it untill you can cue "take it" and "hold" and have him heel with you and finally then do a "back up". Once you can do that, then add the tug on the door. For that put the rope on the door, cue a "take it" of the rope, then a "hold" of the rope" and then ask him to "back up." and it should work. That is how I teach it to service dogs anyway and it works. Good luck!

Lovely job Ricky. It won't take you long to figure out how to open the door. I taught Sing a few years ago and he mastered that trick within second so I get him to show the others how to open the door so they can follow what he was doing. If you get stuck, I will send Sing over!

How much you remind me of Wall-e in this video! I think he'll master it in time. Maybe your mom can mark and jackpot whenever you move the door? I've never been patient enough to teach a rope pull though, so I dunno!

Oh, Ricky - backing up AND pulling on the rope is "multi-tasking" - am having trouble with that too! :-)

I think sometimes when we doggies are having trouble - at the next session, we can sometimes suddenly "get it" - like our brains needed time to digest things! So if you're already moving it a little bit, I would say just keep practising and rewarding the babysteps for now, so that you get more confident doing it. If the humans raise the criteria too quickly, it can make us doggies lose confidence.

Does Ricky like the rope, you could always use a different toy attached if he has something he likes tugging more on a different type of thing, putting the door where it is super easy to move to start with, mostly I would think teaching the hold, and getting a little duration, also when you were doing that it seems like that might build up the value in what ever you are using for him to tug on. It looks like it has a GREAT start for a great trick!

We, too, love watching you and Ricky shape new tricks. You are one of MOM's inspirations to help us learn new tricks/task, for us to use during our therapy work. And, you and Marie, for getting involved/ready for agility matches. Our first showing is going to me a fun match in June.

About Me

My name is Ricky (Covewind Little Ricky, AX,AXJ,CGC) and I am a six year old tri-color Shetland Sheepdog. I do agility and I like to learn tricks too! This blog is about all that and some other stuff as well!